Subj : Re: Hell hath no fury ... To : All From : wildbilly@withoutta.net Date : Thu Jan 31 2019 19:19:40 Path: eternal-september.org!reader01.eternal-september.org!reader02.eternal-september ..org!news.eternal-september.org!news.eternal-september.org!mx04.eternal-septemb er.org!mx04.eternal-september.org!feeder.eternal-september.org!v102.xanadu-bbs. net!xanadu-bbs.net!news.glorb.com!news-xfer.nntp.sonic.net!posts.news.sonic.net !nnrp1.nntp.sonic.net!not-for-mail From: Bill Rose Newsgroups: austin.general,austin.politics,dfw.general,misc.rural,neworleans.general Subject: Re: Hell hath no fury ... Organization: Camp Runamuck References: <3lp5n75e1p39a2u8imk98lslju4q4puhvq@4ax.com> User-Agent: MT-NewsWatcher/3.5.2 (Intel Mac OS X) Date: Mon, 02 Apr 2012 15:13:53 -0700 Message-ID: Lines: 187 NNTP-Posting-Date: 02 Apr 2012 22:13:51 GMT NNTP-Posting-Host: 69af9eca.news.sonic.net X-Trace: DXC=KNhl1@9aKZc0i6XahnmA UnAWE\^A6bR:h X-Complaints-To: abuse@sonic.net Xref: news.eternal-september.org austin.general:188 austin.politics:43 dfw.general:321 misc.rural:991 neworleans.general:28 In article , Mike Smith wrote: > >[T]he bailout is either incompetence or fraud, because the problem, > >according to the government, is the defaulting mortgages, so the money > >should be directed at refinancing the mortgages and paying off the > >foreclosed ones. And that would restore the value of the mortgage-backed > >securities that are threatening the financial institutions. If the value > >was restored, the crisis would be over. So there's no connection between > >the government's explanation of the crisis and its solution to the > >crisis. > > - Paul Craig Roberts, former Assistant Secretary of the Treasury > >Department in the Reagan administration and a former associate editor of > >the Wall Street Journal. > > > > Again, this was caused by Congress passing laws allowing the financial > institutes to do what they did. > > You realize you are making my case, right? Congress is fucking up our > world with their ridiculous regulations. > > The rest of your post is your usual moronic misinterpretation of the > facts, based on your fearful delusional fantasies. > > And you have proven, once again, that you do not know the meaning of > "deregulate" and "regulate", or "proof". > > Mikie smith Remember a peanut butter recall last year, Mikie? "Georgia officials say they will consider charging the company and its CEO, Stewart Parnell, with manslaughter, if federal authorities do not. During Wednesday's hearings, Rep. Greg Walden (R) of Oregon held up a plastic container wrapped in yellow caution tape containing snacks made with peanut butter likely tainted with salmonella and dared Parnell to have some. A visibly uncomfortable Parnell declined. He then invoked his Fifth Amendment right not to answer questions that could be self-incriminatory. PCA supplies about 2.5 percent of America's peanut products and had $25 million in sales last year, up from $15 million three years earlier. The FBI raided the Blakely, Ga., plant and Parnell's home headquarters in Virginia this week. Previous testifiers had said that Parnell grew frustrated at the internal salmonella findings and finally ordered employees to find another lab to do the analysis. "The time lapse, besides the cost is costing us huge $$$$$," Parnell, who had been a peanut-quality adviser to the US Department of Agriculture until his removal this week, complained in one e-mail about the test results." For example, one manufacturer might coat the paste in chocolate and make a peanut butter cup, which is then sold to another company that mixes it into ice cream that may or may not also contain peanut butter. A grocery chain might buy that ice cream and sell it under a private label. ---- Earlier in 2007, Con Agra had a similar peanut butter recall. The FDA identified the presence of Salmonella bacteria in ConAgra's peanut butter. Salmonella and other bacteria live in the intestinal tracts of warm-blooded animals, such as rats and birds, and are found in their feces. ___ So when you find Salmonella, Mikie, you have found shit. In these cases, there were regulations that weren't followed. REgulation don't help, if they aren't enforced. Then you have a situation like derivatives, where there was no regulation, but not because of lack of effort on the part of Brooksley Born. ---- The Great American Stickup: How Reagan Republicans and Clinton Democrats Enriched Wall Street While Mugging Main Street by Robert Scheer (Available at a library near you) "Lately, I've been hearing various regulators raise con- cerns about off-exchange markets and about derivatives gen- erally," Gramm is quoted as saying. "The questions they're raising include: Are derivative markets too big, too risky, placing the clearing system in jeopardy? Are derivatives and their risks simply too esoteric and complex for anyone but a rocket scientist to understand? Are the derivative markets under-regulated?" Those were intended as rhetorical questions and dismissed m the negative by Gramm. She claimed there wasn't that much money involved, anyway: "First, there is [the] notion that the size of the derivatives market could disrupt the fi- nancial system. When people talk about swaps, we often hear figures in trillions of dollars," she said. Gramm emphasized that the actual value of the debt--as opposed to the spiraling quantity of offsetting bets and hedges on the value--was much more modest, and thus nothing to worry about. If only. Five years later, the notional value of OTC deriv- atives had grown to $24 trillion, and after another ten years, when the meltdown occurred, we would be talking about $640 trillion in the notional value of all unregulated deriva- tive trading. "The Monster That Ate Wall Street: How 'credit default swaps'--an insurance against bad loans--turned from a smart bet into a killer" was the title and subheading of a Newsweek article on October 6, 2008, referring to credit de- fault swaps, "which ballooned into a $62 trillion market... nearly four times the value of all stock traded on the New t York Stock Exchange." Yet it is important to pay attention to Wendy Gramm's arguments back then because they in fact carried the day, resulting in the passage eight years later--at her sen- ator husband's instigation--of the Commodity Futures Modernization Act, which would enshrine into law the Gramms' hands-off approach to the derivatives market de jure. The CFMA's blanket ban on any regulation by any gov- ernment agency of these suspect derivatives could be seen as taking direct aim at Wendy Gramm's successor as com- mission chair, Brooksley Born, who would dare to raise sig- nificant questions about the soundness of these products. The Second Great Depression was caused by DEREGULATING investment banks (via the gutting of the Glass Steagall Act), and Wendy Gramm's insistence that Commodity Futures didn't need to be regulated. (Unleashing financial institutions from the heavy-handed burden of regulation, or something like that.) ----- November 3, 1998 CFTC Chief Refuses to Take Back Seat in Derivatives Debate By MICHAEL SCHROEDER Staff Reporter of THE WALL STREET JOURNAL WASHINGTON -- The nation's top financial regulators wish Brooksley Born would just shut up.For nearly a year, Ms. Born, chairwoman of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, has been warning about the risk of unregulated over-the-counter derivatives -- financial contracts used to hedge bets on the direction of such things as commodity prices, interest rates or the value of stocks or bonds. No less than Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan, Treasury Secretary Robert Rubin and Securities and Exchange Commission Chairman Arthur Levitt have tried to muzzle her, claiming threats of new oversight could unsettle markets and trigger lawsuits. --- And there you have it. Ten years before the crash, Brooksley Born was stiffeled by the FED Chairman Alan Greenspan (an Ayn Rand acolyte), and the derivatives went unregulated. Mortgage lenders made their fees, investment banks took sub-prime loans, and converted them into derivatives at an enhanced price. Rating agencies (S&P, Fitch, Moody) were payed to say that they were AAA (the kind that pension funds have to buy), and you had a Bubble (Ponzi scheme) where every thing depended on more people buying in to keep running up the prices, and then . . . the bubble popped. We are still on the hook, nationally, for $9 trillion dollars, and pension funds, and other investors took a bath (about $5 trillion), because the derivatives weren't REGULATED. The criminals in Washington are calling for more deregulation, as if that isn't what got us into this fix in the first place. I know you won't understand, Mikie, but I'm sure that there are some readers out there who want to know .